Picturing the Watershed: The Songs, Stories and Images of the Potomac River
Rivers & Trails Artists Proposal
National Park Service, National Capital Region
April 9, 2001
Background: Noted landscape writer Charles E. Little has
said, "Behind every successful conservation project
is a writer. Planners do good technical plans but they
aren't very good at communicating their ideas to
the public. Government agencies, such as the National Park
Service (NPS) should hire writers and other artists to
help them add vision to and public understanding of rivers
and trails".
For years, within the Potomac River watershed and the
larger Chesapeake Bay region, private organizations and
government agencies such as NPS and the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency have been looking for ways to engage
writers, painters, story-tellers, and performing artists to
participate in river conservation and trail projects.
Area artists have been encouraged to use their skills in
"evocative communication" to help local leaders and
government staff to help people describe the values of
specific places and encourage people to work to protect
them. These types of partnerships have proven to be an
effective way for artists to recognize important values,
raise issues and advocate a vision for the future.
Proposal: A group of private organizations, under the
sponsorship of NPS-NCR, propose to host a Rivers & Trails
Artist to work within the Potomac River watershed in Fiscal
Year 2002 to explore ways to:
Make artists skills, including writing, story-telling,
painting and performing arts, more useful and accessible to
individuals involved in river and trail efforts.
Increase public awareness of the often difficult-to-express connections we all share with rivers and trails in the watershed.
Create a regular dialogue between artists, local leaders,
and government planners to find ways to connect with each other and the special places that we live in, enjoy, and work to conserve.
Encourage artists, local leaders and NPS planners to balance aesthetic inquiry with the standard patterns of logical inquiry.
Integrating the Arts: The artist that is selected to work
with this effort will participate in a Rivers & Trails
Artists Roundtable with Anne Pearson of the Alliance for
Sustainable Education; Sara Ebenreck of St. Mary's College: Tom Wisner
of the Chestory: Center for the Chesapeake Story effort; Eli Flam of
the Potomac Review; Glenn Eugster, NPS-NCR, and others.
The roundtable dialogue will be convened periodically to:
- identify ways to use the arts to help connect the sacred
essence of the water, the land and the gentle life giving culture into current and future RTCA projects. Specific regional artists, funding resources, written visual and audio information, events and activities will be complied into a publication suitable for use by community leaders and RTCA project staff. In addition, noteworthy River & Trail Artist Project cases studies, from the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay watershed will be described.
- hold a workshop for artists, community leaders,
scientists, naturalists, politicians, and RTCA staff to use to describe the often difficult-to-express connections we share with the Potomac River, its tributaries, its riverlands and the trails of the watershed.
Staff Commitment: Glenn Eugster, Assistant Regional
Director of NPS-NCR will be the artist's point of contact
and will help to facilitate project involvement. RTCA
staff will provide support to the Roundtable.
The artist will be provided office space and in-kind
support services, including telephones, copying, etc. at
the Potomac River Center at 1730 K Street, NW, Washington,
- The Potomac River Center also is home for staff from
the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail, Friends of
the Potomac, Potomac Conservancy, National Park Foundation and others.
Local & Regional Funding Partners: The sponsors
agree to match the National Endowment for the Arts funding on a one-to-
one basis. Funding will be solicited from the more than 200
public agencies and private partner organizations that NPS-
NCR works with in the watershed.
Project Partners: The following persons have agreed to
participate in this project.
Tom Wisner is a Folk Singer and co-founder of Chestory:
The Center for the Chesapeake Story. He was born near the
Potomac River and has more than 30 years of experience as
an environmental educator/musician. He has collaborated
with Dr. E.L. Cronin at the Chesapeake Bay Laboratory,
worked as a Ranger-Naturalist in Sequoia National Park and
is currently working at Chestory.
Sara Ebenreck is an environmental ethicist who
coordinates the cross-disciplinary (arts through sciences)
environmental studies area at St. Mary's College, MD and
teaches its multi-disciplinary core course. She was
formerly editor of the American Land Forum, a publication
that embraced the vision of arts as well as the natural and
social sciences in work to plan the future of the American
landscape. She is co-founder of the non-profit project
Chestory.
Glenn Eugster is an Assistant Regional Director for the
NPS-NCR in Washington, DC. He attended the University of
Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Fine Arts for two years
and served as manager for various artist-conservation
projects including the: National Children's Theater for the
Environment play "Willa in the Wetlands", "Audubon's
America" project with The Audubon Society; and Natural
History & Nature Writing Workshop with EPA, NC State
Museum, Natural History Society of MD, and others.
Eli Flam is the Editor/Publisher of "The Potomac Review". The Review
is a regionally rooted quarterly with an international range of prose,
poetry and artwork that seeks ethical depth-and elicits "the sound of
surprise". Eli has worked as a free-lance writer and editor with a
wide ranging of placements in newspapers and magazines. He is a
retired Senior Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. Information Agency
and is currently a Board Member of the Friends of the Potomac.
Anne Pearson is President of the Alliance for Sustainable
Education in Edgewater, MD. She is a community advocate for
sustainable development and former performing artist. Ms.
Pearson sponsored a series of Annapolis, Maryland "Forums"
to provide citizens with the opportunity to discuss land
uses, sacred places, stormwater management and waste
disposal. Recently she co-produced a CD-ROM, for U.S. EPA
titled "This Place Called Home: Tools for Sustainable
Communities".
For Further Information: Glenn Eugster, NPS-NCR, 1100 Ohio Drive, SW, Room 350, Washington, DC 20242.
(202) 619-7492 phone; (202) 619-7220 fax
Email: glenn_eugster @nps.gov
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